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Satan, Evil, & the Church

Pope Francis has done a remarkable thing. He has brought the discussion of the reality of Satan and evil back to center stage and that is crucial to living a Catholic life.

One benefit of my former life as criminal and prisoner was the daily encounter with evil removing any doubt that it existed.

This article by Anne Hendershott examines the impact of Francis.

An excerpt.

In his first homily, given on March 14th, Pope Francis cautioned the faithful that “he who does not pray to the Lord, prays to the devil.” “When we do not profess Jesus Christ,” he further insisted, “we profess the worldliness of the devil, a demonic worldliness.” Since that day, he has spoken often of the one he has called the “prince of this world,” and the “father of lies.” And, in the book, On Heaven and Earth, then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio devoted an entire chapter to “The Devil”, warning that Satan’s fruits are “destruction, division, hatred and calumny.”

For many Catholics—especially post-Vatican II Catholics—speaking aloud of evil, sin, and Satan is something they may never have experienced, even in Church. Some may have to resort to the internet (or dictionary) to look up a definition of calumny. It seems that after a long hiatus, evil and sin have been “rediscovered” by some.

More than sixty years ago, T. S. Eliot wrote about the sense of alienation that occurs when social regulators begin to splinter and the controlling moral authority of a society is no longer effective. He suggested that a “sense of sin” was beginning to disappear. In his play, The Cocktail Party, a troubled young protagonist visits a psychiatrist and confides that she feels “sinful” because of her relationship with a married man. She is distressed not so much by the illicit relationship, but rather, by the strange sense of sin. Eliot writes, “Having a sense of sin seems abnormal” to her—she had never noticed before that such behavior might be seen in those terms. She believed that she had become “ill.”

Writing in 1950, Eliot knew that the language of sin was declining even then, yet most of us would assume that the concept of sin was still strong. Looking back though, it seems that for many, the sense of sin was already beginning to be replaced by an emerging therapeutic culture. Within that growing culture of “liberation”, people no longer viewed themselves as sinful when they drank too much, took drugs, or engaged in violent or abusive behaviors. Rather, such actions were increasingly viewed as indicators that such individuals were victims of an illness they had little or no control over.